


Prince of Ice

by Kien Rugastelo (cein)



Series: Fairy Tale AU [2]
Category: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Death in Childbirth, Magic, Names
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:28:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25912105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cein/pseuds/Kien%20Rugastelo
Summary: Fai's connection to Yuuko is an ancient one.
Series: Fairy Tale AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1880530
Kudos: 3





	Prince of Ice

**Author's Note:**

> There isn't any more tragedy here than Fai's canon backstory, for anyone who may be worried about that. Linearly, this fits before the previous work, but since when has TRC ever been linear?

The birth was rough, but she knew that it would be. Many things about this land were harsh, especially the winters. It was why the king had taken the chance to imprison the witch in the first place. If they could harness her power, they could use it for their advantage, and make the kingdom prosperous again.

Without her name, the witch could only assure the king that the kingdom of Valeria would span without bounds. The king had taken it as a good omen. It was not.

Tonight, though, the king’s daughter was dying. The king had bartered with her just hours ago at the encouragement of the doctor — it was a perilous pregnancy to start, and the doctor was certain only one of the twins would survive. So, the king had bargained, and paid the requisite price for a safe delivery.

The king would learn to pick his words more carefully.

The first of the children emerged, and the mother breathed out a Name. Fai was wrapped for warmth and attended to, healthy and in no danger.

The second child emerged, but the mother had not the breath for a Name. The midwife and doctor were attending Fai and the fading mother, and so the witch took her chance and provided a Name for this one herself.

* * *

Fai and Yuui were nigh inseparable, but Yuui had taken more to the witch than his brother, though he did not know why. The witch knew why. She did not say.

The king had learned, and selected his words more carefully, but the things he bargained with soon were not his own. The twins were long too young and sheltered to notice people of the land disappearing. The coffers were low, the harvests unfruitful, the enemies to the south powerful. The king had little else to bargain with. What were a few lives in a remote village that was dying out anyway, in exchange for the safety of the kingdom as a whole?

But each innocent life sacrificed was another blight. The impurity of the bargains poisoned the land and its luck further, catapulting their people toward their doom all the more quickly with each drop of spilt blood. The witch was bound, however, by the land, by her power, by the trappings of her gilded cage. She could no more warn the king than she could refuse a balanced exchange.

It was, perhaps, inevitable. The sickness rotted the king’s mind away, stealing his human heart away from him. He came to strike a deal almost daily by the time the kingdom was reduced down to the castle grounds themselves. Nothing lived, nothing grew, everything rotten — but not the twins, and they were getting older now, wiser.

They were still so young when Yuui came to her directly. “I want to make a deal.”

“Oh?” the witch asked, interested in what her young charge would ask of her.

“There’s something wrong. The adults won’t say what it is, but something bad’s happening,” Yuui began, twisting his fingers in his hands nervously. He had never asked the witch for anything directly, but he had seen his grandfather do so hundreds of times. “I want Fai to be safe.”

Things were indeed coming to a head, and the witch knew the few paths of how it all would end. Yuui was not unwise to begin taking precautionary measures, but he didn’t have the experience to know which ones to take and how. The witch, however much she wished she wasn’t, was still bound. “Are you certain? If I grant your wish, there will no longer be a Yuui.”

Yuui tore his eyes away, still wringing his hands, uncertain. He didn’t know what she meant. Would he die? Yuui hesitated, right up until he didn’t, and his face was so certain, so sure.

The witch wished she were not bound.

“I’m certain.”

* * *

“I want to make a deal.” The other one, this time. The one who still had a name, for now. The one who had spent more time in the company of the king than the witch. The one who had seen the mistakes of ill-formed wishes up close.

“Oh?”

“I want to know how to keep my brother safe and stop the king.”

“Are you certain? If I grant your wish, there will no longer be a Yuui.”

“I’m certain.”

* * *

The price for safety had been a Name; the price for stopping the king had been higher. The surviving brother, the one who had first given up his name, sobbed over the broken corpse of his twin. He spared no tears for the dead king — no one did. There was no one left in the kingdom but the child who would not be king, and the witch who could not be freed.

The witch drew the still living child into her lap, soothing him as best she could, but he was inconsolable. “How could he do that? How could he just leave me like this?”

They would all be free someday, but not soon. “Because he loved you, “Fai”.”

* * *

What had once been a thriving kingdom remained a desolate wasteland, even with the king long gone. The winters stayed harsh, the ground barren. People avoided coming this far north without consciously knowing why, animals fled from the poisoned lands. Valeria only existed as a memory in the minds of Fai and the witch, and as a curse that no one else remembered or understood.

Fai aged until he didn’t. The king’s trap on the witch bound her to the land, and Fai’s wish bound him to her. Neither could pass until both were freed. He learned from her what magic he could, often just to pass the time in their little private realm. The earth warmed, the mammoths disappeared, the snow melted more often, giving Fai the chance to bask in sunlight over dusty earth.

But there were places that were green, Fai knew, though he could not go to those places. It took him an embarrassingly long amount of time to figure out how to bring the green here. “Is there a price I can pay that will heal this land?”

The witch was unsurprised at the question. “The king most tried to protect the throne and paid that price with the lives of this land.” Fai was her charge; it was within her limits to explain the rules to him, now. “If you dismantle the castle, the bargain will be nullified and life will return.”

“I suppose I can’t use my magic,” Fai presumed aptly.

“Not as such,” she was able to tell him. Fai understood, and bowed low.

“I will return.”

He did not for a long time.

* * *

Taking the castle apart brick by brick left Fai’s fingers scarred. He could not blast it apart, but he could bolster his strength, throwing bricks often into the sea to be sure the castle was thoroughly dismantled — stacking them elsewhere would just be a relocation, but the sea swept the stones away or weathered them down into nothingness with time, utterly destroying all. It took years, possibly decades, but Fai hardly noticed. He was already so, so very old.

The witch’s curse had come to pass and Valeria, no longer existing in anything but the memory of two trapped people, had no bounds.

* * *

The witch had been right and the spring after Fai had tossed that final hunk of brick into the sea, came grass, then bushes, then trees. Insects returned, lizards, rodents, rabbits. Fai spotted a fox playing in the meadow one summer. He liked foxes.

What also came were people. Nomads becoming settled on edges of what had once been Valeria gradually spread deeper and deeper into the recovering lands. They both quickly learned that the space the two of them existed in was warped. Sometimes people could enter it, sometimes people could pass through without ever being there at all, and sometimes, very rarely, a person could stumble upon the witch’s hut — a person with a strong desire that surpassed their capacity for self-preservation. Those were the people who carried legends back to the folk who were not even aware their space existed. Tales grew taller than the pines and the oaks, until the picture people held of the witch hardly resembled her at all. Fai didn’t mind. He wasn’t sure what the witch thought.

He wasn’t used to people anymore. He could still recall his courtly manners, and behave in the proper ways, but humans bothered him in a way that he could not dig out from beneath his skin. Maybe it was because he was so old now. Maybe it was because they could die and he could not. Maybe it was because the ones who did manage to find them were often of the cruelest sort, and so the few he did meet disgusted him.

Most of the ones who remained tethered to their world after ill bargains struck had not just their names but their human forms removed from them as well. They wandered the realm, just as eternal as Fai and the witch were. Some had their human forms, but without humans to speak to and be human with, they nearly all reverted to their animal forms by default before long. At least then they could speak to those who were the same as themselves.

(Two children had come two hundred or so years ago, and they had been the dearest things Fai thought he had ever met. He counted them as the exception to the rule.)

In any case, when he wasn’t directly speaking with the witch, he tended to favor his fox form. People left him alone, then. Sometimes the witch still petted his soft fur. Many times, she did not.

He was in his fox form when a bird alighted on the witch’s shoulder, twittering into her ear. “Oh?” she asked it, intrigued, “Did you catch where he was from?” The bird chattered on; the witch turned her eyes to Fai.

The time had come.

* * *

When Kurogane crossed the stream, Fai snatched him off his horse and spirited him away to the witch’s hut.

When Kurogane lost his name, the witch did not send him directly to Fai, but to Flower’s tree instead — a change to plans that were eons in the making.

Fai did not mind.

**Author's Note:**

> For people who love Older Than Dirt Fai, I present Ice Age Kingdom Fai.


End file.
